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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Jeremiah 31

Notes:
verse 2 - constructing the second half from the parallel with the first. No specific subject of the verb in an infinitive form. The first half has a complex subject and predicate so word order cannot follow the music.
verse 5 - eat without waiting for the full 3 years of prohibition. I have not seen חלל used like this but given its two different glosses, commence/start or profane, the sense is reasonable though thoroughly condensed into the stem.
verse 6 - Ephraim going up to mount Zion sounds like a return of the northern tribes to Jerusalem worship.
verses 10 and 24 - about the term troop. Occasionally words give the wrong impression. A troop today is always about the military. But there is an archaic usage as a flock of sheep. Sorry about that. When I write troop, I always mean the archaic synonym עדר = צאן.
verse 19 - JB and NIV have I beat my breast.
verse 21 Here the northern tribes are called to return - from where to where? The word glossed as cairns is a hapax. Guessed from the parallel.
verse 22 needs an essay - it's not a boy girl axis. The pair of words is not male-female, but female against גבר and that word may be 'a man' but not in this reading, and certainly not exclusively. Ponder.

Note me well. I will bring them from the land of the north, and I will collect them from the flanks of the earth. In them, blind and lame, pregnant and begetting together,
a great congregation. They will return here.

With weeping they will come, and with supplications I will escort them. I will have them walk by torrents of water in a way that is upright. They will not stumble in it.
For I am to Israel as a father and Ephraim, he is my firstborn.

And they will come and shout for joy on the high ground of Zion, and will flow together to the goodness of Yahweh over grain, and over new wine, and over clarified oil, and over the little ones of flock and herd,
and their being will be as a garden saturated, and they will not add to drooping any more.

Is Ephraim my precious son or a reveling boy? For as often as I speak against him, remembering, I remember him still,
therefore my inner parts murmur for him. Compassion, I will have compassion on him, an oracle of Yahweh.

Thus says Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, Continue, they will say, this thing in the land of Judah and in its cities when I turn their captivity.
Yahweh will bless you, the home of righteousness, the holy hill.

And it will happen that as I was vigilant over them to deport, and to break off, and to overthrow, and to eliminate, and to injure,
so I will be vigilant over them to build and to plant, an oracle of Yahweh.

Not according to the covenant that I cut with their ancestors on the day I held resolutely their hands to bring them out from the land of Egypt,
my covenant which they themselves have thwarted, and I myself was husband among them, an oracle of Yahweh.

But this is the covenant which I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, an oracle of Yahweh. I will give my instruction in their entrails, and over their heart I will write it,
and I will be their God and they, they will be my people.

Nor will they teach any more each his associate and each his kin, saying, Know Yahweh,
for all of them will know me, from the least and to the greatest of them, an oracle of Yahweh. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will not remember any more.

Thus says Yahweh, if are measured, the heavens upward, and are examined, the foundations of earth downward,
even I, I will refuse all the seed of Israel concerning all that they did, an oracle of Yahweh.

And all the valley of the carcasses and the fat, and all the fields to the wadi of the Kidron, to the corner of the gate of the horses toward the sunrise will be holy to Yahweh.
It will not be deported and will not be overthrown any more for ever.